The Amazon AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty certification is designed to prove your skills to utilize AWS data lakes and analytics to receive insights from data. This designation is intended for experienced candidates that have solid skills in working with AWS services. To be more precise, they should be able to create, design, protect, and maintain analytical solutions.
Ideal candidates for this AWS certification are individuals with at least 5 years of experience with common data analytics technologies, 2 years of experience in dealing with AWS services, understanding of AWS data analytics services and how they are combined, and finally, how these services conform to the data lifecycle of storage, collection, processing, and visualization.
This AWS designation can be gained by passing the DAS-C01 exam. It’s aimed at candidates who are engaged in a data analytics role. The exam includes 65 questions, 15 of which are unscored. You are to tackle multiple choice or multiple response items within the given time frame which is 180 minutes. The exam will cost you $300. You can succeed in this evaluation if you score 750 points out of 1000.
Speaking of the exam content, your skills will be tested in 5 domains.
The first one is focused on verifying your skills in collection. It means that you should understand the operational characteristics of the collection system, define the latency characteristics, estimate costs that refer to data acquisition and transfer, evaluate the failure scenarios, and identify data persistence. You also should find the appropriate collection system that deal with frequency, volume, and the source of data. The subtopics like assessing tradeoffs, matching flow characteristics, choosing a collection solution, describing the data transformation process are also part of the section.
The second domain refers to storage and data management. This one checks your skills in defining operation characteristics that concern the storage solution for analytics, determining retrieval patterns and data access, choosing suitable data schema, structure, format, and layout. In addition, your proficiency in finding the best strategy to fulfill data lifecycle requirements, implementing data retention and lifecycle policies will be checked. And your skills in defining the suitable system for cataloging data and managing metadata will be assessed in this section.
The third domain is dedicated to checking your skills in processing. In this part, you should demonstrate your skills to define the most appropriate requirements that refer to data processing solution. You should be able to offer a solution that will help to prepare and transform data for analysis. That’s why your knowledge of ELT and ETL techniques, failover and replication mechanisms, cost-optimization techniques will be beneficial. And additionally, you should use automated techniques and apply suitable methods for repeatable workflows and identifying processing failures.
The fourth domain validates your skills in dealing with analysis and visualization. Here you should be able to define operational features that refer to the analysis and visualization solution, provide the suitable data analysis solution, as well as offer the appropriate data virtualization solution in a given scenario.
The final domain present in this exam is centered on security. Thus, you should demonstrate your skills to apply authentication and authorization mechanisms, use data protection and encryption techniques, and utilize data governance control. For that you should be knowledgeable of the federated access, IAM, SSO, ACL permission, client-side and server-side encryption, AWS KMS, and data governance requirements.
The annual salary you can earn with the AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty certification reaches $123,807, as stated on Ziprecruiter website.
